Marketing pros warned Elon Musk’s temporary cap on Twitter users’ post reading might hurt the company’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s efforts to attract advertisers.
Musk revealed Saturday that Twitter would limit accounts’ daily tweet reads to deter “extreme levels” of data mining and system exploitation.
After hitting the limit, users provided images proving they couldn’t read any tweets, including corporate marketers’.
Ad industry professionals claimed the move hinders Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising director who became Twitter’s CEO last month.
The Financial Times reported this week that Yaccarino has tried to reestablish contacts with advertisers that left the site after Musk bought it last year.
On Sunday, Forrester research director Mike Proulx called the constraints “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already unsettled by Musk’s “chaos” on the site.
Linda Yaccarino’s advertiser trust gap grew. “Her industry credibility cannot reverse it,” he added.
Lou Paskalis, founder of advertising firm AJL Advisory and former Bank of America marketing chief, called Yaccarino Musk’s “last best hope” for ad revenue and company value.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he added.
The new cap limited unverified accounts to 600 posts a day and new unverified accounts to 300. Musk posted on the site that verified accounts may read 6,000 daily posts.
Hours later, he stated the maximum was upped to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 for unconfirmed, and 500 for new unverified.
Twitter did not respond to questions for comment about Sunday’s limited duration.
Jasmine Enberg, Insider Intelligence’s chief analyst, called capping user viewing “catastrophic” for the platform’s ad business.
This won’t help advertisers return. “Bringing advertisers back is already hard,” she said.
Musk called Twitter’s requirement to log in to access tweets a “temporary emergency measure” to combat data scraping.
Musk had previously criticized OpenAI, ChatGPT’s owner, for exploiting Twitter data to train their massive language models.
Reddit and major news media have protested about AI companies utilizing their data to build AI models for fees.
Indiana University Bloomington professor Kai-Cheng Yang said the constraints appeared to stop third parties, particularly search engines, from harvesting Twitter data.
“It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and less efficient,” he said.
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